Rice is a facultative short day (SD) plant. In addition to serving as a model plant for molecular genetic studies of monocots, rice is a staple crop for about half of the world's population. Heading date is a critical agronomic trait, and many genes controlling heading date have been cloned over the last 2 decades. The mechanism of flowering in rice from recognition of day length by leaves to floral activation in the shoot apical meristem has been extensively studied.

Predicting phenotypes from genetic (G), environmental (E), and management (M) conditions is a long-standing challenge with implications to agriculture, medicine, and conservation. Most methods reduce the factors in a dataset (feature engineering) in a subjective and potentially oversimplified manner. Deep neural networks such as Multilayer Perceptrons (MPL) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can overcome this by allowing the data itself to determine which factors are most important.

Grain size and grain number play extremely important roles in rice grain yield. Here, we identify GW10, which encodes a P450 subfamily protein and controls grain size and grain number by using Lemont (tropical japonica) as donor parent and HJX74 (indica) as recipient parent. The GW10 locus was mapped into a 14.6 kb region in HJX74 genomic on the long arm of chromosome 10. Lower expression of the gw10 in panicle is contributed to the shorter and narrower rice grain, and the increased number of grains per panicle. In contrast, overexpression of GW10 is contributed to longer and wider rice grain.

Rice is one of the most important food crops in the world. However, stable rice production is constrained by various diseases, in particular rice blast, sheath blight, bacterial blight, and virus diseases. Breeding and cultivation of resistant rice varieties is the most effective method to control the infection of pathogens. Exploitation and utilization of the genetic determinants of broad-spectrum resistance represent a desired way to improve the resistance of susceptible rice varieties. Recently, researchers have focused on the identification of rice broad-spectrum disease resistance genes, which include R genes, defense-regulator genes, and quantitative trait loci (QTL) against two or more pathogen species or many isolates of the same pathogen species.

Due to the high immunity to powdery mildew, Dasypyrum villosum 6VS has been one of the most successful applications of the wild relatives in modern wheat breeding. Along with the desired traits, side-effects could be brought when large alien chromosome fragments are introduced into wheat, but little is known about effects of 6VS on agronomic traits. Here, we found that T6VS·6DL translocation had significantly positive effects on grain weight, plant heightand spike length, and small negative effects on total spikelet number and spikelet compactness using recipient and wheat-D. villosum T6VS·6DL allohexaploid wheats, Wan7107 and Pm97033.

Flag leaf morphology (FLM) is a critical factor affecting plant architecture and grain yield in wheat. The genetic architecture of FLM traits has been extensively studied with QTL mapping in bi-parental populations, while few studies exploited genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in diverse populations. In this study, a panel of 197 elite and historical varieties from China was evaluated for five FLM traits including the length (FLL), width (FLW), ratio (FLR), area (FLA) and angle (FLANG) as well as yield in nine environments

The elevated CO₂ (eCO₂) has positive response on plant growth and negative response on insect pests. As a contemplation, the feeding pattern of the brown plant hopper, Nilaparvata lugens Stål on susceptible and resistant rice cultivars and their growth rates exposed to eCO₂ conditions were analyzed. The eCO₂ treatment showed significant differences in percentage of emergence and rice biomass that were consistent across the rice cultivars, when compared to the ambient conditions.

Benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs) are a diverse class of medicinal plant natural products. Nearly 500 dimeric bisbenzylisoquinoline alkaloids (bisBIAs), produced by the coupling of two BIA monomers, have been characterized and display a range of pharmacological properties, including anti-inflammatory, antitumor, and antiarrhythmic activities. In recent years, microbial platforms have been engineered to produce several classes of BIAs

Decades of air pollution regulation have yielded enormous benefits in the United States, but vehicle emissions remain a climate and public health issue. Studies have quantified the vehicle-related fine particulate matter (PM_2.5)-attributable mortality but lack the combination of proper counterfactual scenarios, latest epidemiological evidence, and detailed spatial resolution; all needed to assess the benefits of recent emission reductions. We use this combination to assess PM_2.5-attributable health benefits and also assess the climate benefits of on-road emission reductions between 2008 and 2017. We estimate total benefits of $270 (190 to 480) billion in 2017.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous data challenges in the United States. Policy makers, epidemiological modelers, and health researchers all require up-to-date data on the pandemic and relevant public behavior, ideally at fine spatial and temporal resolution. The COVIDcast API is our attempt to fill this need: Operational since April 2020, it provides open access to both traditional public health surveillance signals (cases, deaths, and hospitalizations)